


Making Our Way Back From Mars

by cerie



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: F/M, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-23
Updated: 2012-08-23
Packaged: 2017-11-12 16:57:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/493573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerie/pseuds/cerie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helen/Nikola (implied, past), Will/Abby; After Nikola grows tired of life on this mortal coil and takes his own life, Helen decides she's tired of being alone and takes matters into her own hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making Our Way Back From Mars

The first time he ever notices anything different about Magnus is at the funeral. She is impeccably dressed, as always, even though it’s by necessity a private service because Nikola Tesla was supposed to have died almost a century ago of natural causes and not in the 21st century by his own hand. She wears black like an armor, rich silk and wool making her pale skin luminous and her blue eyes striking. Her hair seems darker too, edging toward ebony instead of the chestnut and that simply makes the white streak even more noticeable than it would have been before.

He’s never seen her age. Helen Magnus is unassailable and not felled by the agents of time the way other people are and this white streak is a half-inch of vulnerability right in the open. She makes no attempt to conceal it, from what Will can tell, and while it puzzles him, he has other concerns to attend to.

Abby is heavily pregnant and while she hasn’t said anything, Will knows she’s uncomfortable. Magnus has elected to hold the funeral outdoors in one of the gardens of the new Sanctuary complex and it’s on a small hill. The service is expected to be short and sweet and so there are no chairs present. There are a few stone benches and Will nods toward one before Abby mouths back ‘no,’ and Will quickly determines that without lumbar support, that would almost be worse than standing.

Henry says a few things, bumbling and flustering in the way that only Henry can and it is only when Erika walks up to the podium and rubs his arm gently that he steps away, brushing tears away on his sleeve. Will’s never particularly cared for Tesla but to Henry, an inventor and engineer in his own right, Tesla is equal parts idol and funny uncle. Will elects not to speak, but Abby wants to, and when she does it’s choked with sobs about how she’d always found him sort of funny and how he was always a gentleman to her when nobody else was around and that she’ll miss him. It shocks Will. It seems he’s the only one at this funeral who isn’t exactly attached.

Kate doesn’t speak. She skulks near the back of everything and toys with her bracelet while keeping a hawk’s eye on Alistair (Henry’s son) and Mira (her daughter) because they’re toddlers and prone to trouble. Declan elects not to speak either and Will notices that he touches Magnus lightly at the elbow and nods toward Abby. Their words are silent but no less clear and Magnus goes to the coffin and lays her hand against it, her words soft and low and in a language that Will’s certain is Serbian even though he doesn’t know the meaning.

Later, when they’re all gathered in one of Magnus’s smaller drawing rooms and Abby is comfortably ensconced in a chair that swallows her and entertaining polite questions about her pregnancy, Will catches Magnus alone. He doesn’t have as many heart-to-heart private chats with her as he used to, both of them drifting when he got serious with Abby and she decided to keep secrets, play games and court Tesla, but he still considers her his best friend and he’s worried. He’s also puzzled by the streak in her hair but instead he finds himself asking about her words to Tesla at the end.

“Oh? I told him I loved him. I waited too late.”

Will squeezes her hand lightly and thinks that’s excessively sad but he’s got his own wife to attend to.

***

It’s only after they all celebrate Will’s 50th birthday that he notices that something is wrong. Abby has aged over the years, smile lines at the corners of her mouth and gray mixing in with her honey-blonde hair. She’s plumper now, rounded from two children and comfortable with Will and unconcerned with her appearance. She notices his, though, and presses a kiss to his cheek and says he’s just as gorgeous as he’d been when she met him. It’s part flattery and part truth, because Will doesn’t look a day over thirty seven.

His hair hasn’t thinned, he has no wrinkles. He’s still fit and healthy and hasn’t had so much as a cold in the last thirteen years and it’s not something he wants to discuss in the middle of this party. It’s a formal one, even though Will isn’t comfortable with that, because one simply does not turn down an invitation from Helen Magnus when she wants to celebrate one’s birthday. His tux feels too tight at the collar and his shoes seem to pinch when he leaves Abby with the kids and finds Magnus standing at one of the wide windows that surround this new Sanctuary.

Everything is chrome and glass, transparent in a way that Magnus hasn’t been in years. In truth, she’s probably never been transparent in the time that Will’s known her but she used to hide it better. Helen Magnus might walk among mere mortals, but she isn’t one, and she’s sort of like the Abnormals she protects. Beautiful, able to blend, but just a little bit off.

She has her back turned to him and he takes a moment to admire the slope of her neck, pale and slender. Her dark hair is coiled in an elegant knot at her nape and the white streak blends into the rest like a silvery star against the night sky. Her shoulders are rounded and taper into long, elegant hands and they’re dusted with freckles here and there. Her dress is midnight blue satin dotted with tiny diamonds and when she turns to face him, the skirt whirls and makes Will feel like he’s fallen into the Milky Way, forever lost on a trail of stars.

“You did something to me. I’m not aging.” The words are harsh in contrast to this warm and festive evening and Magnus merely purses her lips and looks down and away. She’s not answering him and he wants that answer, _needs_ it, and he grasps her chin harshly and looks her in the eyes before posing the question again. He needs to know what she’s done to him and why, why she feels like she can still manipulate him when he’s grown past the protege into a partner and a man in his own right. He has his own life, his own world, and while he still shares in her work and in her world, he is _not_ hers. Not her plaything. Not any longer.

“What did you do to me? Magnus. I need to know.”

When she speaks, her voice is low and her eyes dart back and forth as if she’s afraid someone will eavesdrop. Will isn’t overly concerned. This is company that’s perfectly all right with the weird and nobody’s going to say anything, least of all his own family. Besides, even if they did, it would serve her right because she shouldn’t be meddling in other people’s lives. Least of all _his_ life, when Will has done nothing but be her loyal soldier and steadfast friend and she’s gone and taken away the one thing that was _his_ , separate from her.

“It’s a serum I devised from my own blood and the water we found in the caves those years ago. The doses have been small. I never expected such a dramatic effect. It appears I’ve halted your aging entirely instead of slowing it down. How unusual.” The words are clinical and cold and he wants to shake her, rail at her, get angry that she’s done this and doesn’t seem to have any remorse whatsoever for it. Maybe years and years ago when he’d been wide-eyed and naive and his life was all-consumed by her, he’d have accepted this blindly. But Will’s built his own life, laid it brick by brick, and Helen Magnus has swept her hand and cast down his castles in one calculated move.

“You didn’t think about the fact that I have a family? That I’m going to have to watch them grow old and die without me? That someday, I’m still going to be me and Abby’s maybe not even going to remember who I am? That my kids will have their own kids and have to explain that their grandfather is some kind of freak? I’m tired of it. I’m tired of the games and I am not your pawn. Not anymore. I quit.”

Magnus pales and lifts a slender hand to her mouth to suppress a gasp. Her eyes look pained when she asks if he’ll ever be able to forgive her and Will spits out a sharp “not on your life,” and he thinks, maybe, he shouldn’t have been so harsh. 

Then again, it’s not like she had any consideration for him. As she once said long ago, turnabout is fair play.

***

He doesn’t speak to her for seventy five years. It’s only when the last of his family is gone that he sends her a card, angry words bleeding on the page, and he doesn’t expect an answer. He receives one in the form of Magnus standing on his stoop, still dressed like some strange mix of modern and Victorian and clad all in deep, dark blue with eyes ringed dark with makeup.

The world is a strange place now, as modern as Hollow Earth ever dared to be, and Will finds he’s tired of it. It had been fascinating at first, living longer than the regular man and seeing things that he’d never dreamed he’d be alive for but the novelty wore off fast when he started losing friends and loved ones. Henry and Erika were the last, their life spans a little longer by virtue of being HAPs but they’re gone too, buried in the little garden along with Tesla and Biggie and Kate and Declan. Everyone’s gone now except him and, apparently, Helen Magnus.

Her face hasn’t changed since the first day he met her and it makes him angry. He isn’t a violent man by nature but he wants to hit her until her skin blooms with bruises and she looks _different_ and not clinical and cold and calculating. He wants her to look human again. She used to have some sort of humanity when Ashley was alive, however fleeting, and now it’s gone and replaced with porcelain and sapphires and a single streak of silver against dark hair.

“What? Wanted to check up on your little experiment? Well, go ahead. I’m still alive. Still look the same. Changed my name about a half dozen times and keep moving around so that people can’t figure out that I’m the same Will Zimmerman from almost a century ago. Does it make you happy to know I’m still yours even though I didn’t want to be any longer?”

Magnus goes to say something and the words die in her throat when Will drags her across his threshold and kisses her harshly, teeth scraping at her lower lip and hands roaming angrily over her suit and up into her carefully-curled hair. Magnus kicks the door shut behind her with one foot, the heel on her shoe scraping against the paint, and what follows is a battle of wills augmented by the heat and passion of a friendship gone sour. 

He isn’t sure how they end up in his bedroom but he suspects it’s Magnus’s fault. She’s never been very good at giving him words and her actions have always spoken louder. Clothes are torn and tossed away and while a younger Will might have been worried about that, an older, jaded Will isn’t. One of the virtues of long life and pensions from Helen Magnus is a comfortable, nearly excessive amount of wealth and he’s gotten freer with his spending now that he knows he’ll be around forever. He’s more prone to excess, prone to the sleek and the sibilant and the things that the old Will could never quite fit into.

Helen Magnus has changed him in more ways than one.

When his fingers find their way between her legs, he finds her slick already. Her thighs fall apart easily and she’s pliant in a way that Will has never seen before. It’s not tender and slow, the way he prefers to make love, but fast and furious and just on this side of rough. He drives into her and tries to channel his anger and his love and his confusion in the motion of his hips and the scrape of his teeth against the delicate skin at the base of her throat and when she comes, she drags her nails down his back and draws blood.

Afterward, before the sweat cools and dries against their skin, the wounds are already knitting up. Helen Magnus hasn’t just made him into what she is, she’s perfected it and made him something that’s entirely her own creation. Will is equal parts disgusted and flattered by that and it’s the flattery that disturbs him the most. Is he doomed to become her? To make history repeat itself all over? Things look different on this side of the hourglass now that the sand no longer flows.

He’s distracted himself with winding a dark lock of hair around his finger and letting it spring into a curl while they catch their breath and he almost misses her question, too lost in her beauty and the enigma that is Helen Magnus.

“Can you ever forgive me for what I’ve done? I simply didn’t want to lose anyone anymore. It hurts too much.”

Will doesn’t answer, merely gets out of bed and gathers his clothes and Magnus takes it as he intends it: a dismissal. She dresses efficiently and when she’s pulling on left shoe, she presses a kiss against his cheek.

“Forgive me, Will. Please?”

***

It starts with letters. It’s such an archaic form of communication when everything is electronic and at the speed of thought but Will finds that he likes using paper and ink. Originally, he’d tried to make it into a production and use a fountain pen and expensive rag paper but it simply wasn’t him. He reverts to scraps of paper and ballpoint pens, a legacy of a Will past, and he notices that Magnus’s letters are a lot more real once his start trending that way.

They write about anything and everything. Politics, religion, her work. He doesn’t work any longer and instead spends his days tending a garden and volunteering at homeless shelters and orphanages and occasionally taking in foster kids who don’t want to be placed anywhere else. He gets to have them for a time and they move on, grateful to him and his encouragement, and he feels more like Helen Magnus now than he ever has.

It occurs to him that they have an anniversary coming up, a century since she altered the course of his life and drove a wedge between them and while it’s been at least a decade since he had the hot, burning anger that threatened to consume him, he’s not really sure how to go about mending fences. Besides, the last time he saw her, they’d done more fucking than talking. Even with the letters, Will isn’t sure where to begin.

He puts that in a letter to her and uses it to gauge whether or not his presence will be welcome. His answer comes in the form of a lavender-scented card with hurried writing, loops and swirls indicating her excitement even if the words are still crisp and formal and undeniably Magnus. It’s a simple response, but one that warms his heart:

> We should end where we begin. Love is infinite and you are my constant. Come home. Please.

Magnus never signs her letters. It’s always excessively clear who they’re from and she hates goodbyes so Will supposes it makes sense. He tucks the card in his pocket and carries it with him on the trip to see her, to go back to the glass and chrome that he left behind almost a century ago, fingers brushing against it whenever he needs encouragement.

The staff is full of people he doesn’t know but when he gives his name, their faces light up and they direct him, urgently, to the garden. There’s a half dozen gardens in this complex alone but Will knows which one they mean and he finds Magnus sitting on one of the stone benches beneath an arbor of roses, petals drifting slowly down to scatter at her feet.

“Hey, you. Long time, no see. You doing something different with your hair? You look ten years younger.”

Will doesn’t get to finish saying hello before Magnus has crushed herself against him in a fierce hug, face tucked in against his neck and lips ghosting against his skin.

“I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Will finds, after a hundred years, that he feels exactly the same.


End file.
